A few days back, a friend did an awesome presentation on Edward Albee. After reading The Zoo Story, I’m frantically looking for more of his work. The Zoo Story, is without a doubt, one of the most mind boggling and indeed, absurd dramas I have ever read through. With so many layers of possible meaning, I’m sure a Derridean would have a ball with it. Although Albee’s nonchalant attitude shines clearly through the dialogue of the play, it wasn’t until I heard this quote that I began to see the through to the ideals of one of America’s foremost modern dramatists. Although he has won three Pulitzers for drama over the years, many of his plays bombed, and yet, apparently, he didn’t care.

“I have great respect for the author’s work,” he says, and he kept writing. Critical rejection “made it clear to me that I’m not an employee. I don’t depend upon acceptance to keep on doing my work. I don’t recall becoming bitter, or disillusioned or anything. I have too much ego. I go about my business.”

In generation of artists obsessed with publishing, staging, filming and releasing, it may be worth to note that at one time, the journey was more important than the destination, the act of writing itself, more important than fame, or awards, or recognition. Sound absurd? Damn straight.

Today, a friend of mine asked me to help with Indian English, and pro-drop. Now, although I had a pretty good idea of the morphological processes involved in this concept, I had never really looked at them in detail. So here we go.

Welcome to the pro-drop party.

Ever been to one of these? Going tomorrow evening. Want to join? Back at ten.

Ladies and gentlemen, have you, I’m, do you and we’ll be have just left the building. Please have a pleasant and pronoun free evening.

The Tynonym or T9onym is a brand spanking new morphological process that stems from the use of mobile phones and the T9 predictive text method when typing SMS messages.

Take out your cell phone now. Open a new text message, and turn your dictionary on. Now hit 2665. You should end up with book. Am I right? Now tab through the rest of the phone’s suggestions. Cool and cook, that’s all mine found. So, the word book’s tynonyms are cool and cook. Simple, isn’t it?

So what’s the significance of this, you ask? Well, there is evidence that word substitution is happening in real life. A little like cockney, it seems that people are substituting these tynonyms for the real word. The Wikipedia entry for the T9onym, although now removed (reportedly due to yet another edit war) spoke of teenagers in the UK who were using book instead of cool. In fact, a little bit of googling turned up this fantastic first hand account of the phenomenon.

My sister Anna’s new nickname is Bomb. Type it find out. You probably guessed already.

And kids (and Media Types from London) are telling me my blog is totally Book. WHAT? Here’s the great new thing. Because ‘Book’ comes up before the word ‘Cool’ on T9, effectively kids are now re-associating the ‘Signified’ – our perfect Platonic notion of ‘Cool’ – with a signifier that shares no traditional meaning derived from existing language, but jumps to another (almost) randomly associated signifier – simply because of T9 associating them through structural similarities.

As noted by this blogger, the most important aspect here is the dramatic deviation from the norm in the construction of sign and signifier. The association here between book and cool is not physical, logical or idealogical. It is purely structural. In reality, this is no stranger to us. We often make structural associations in our mind. For example, I might unconsciously associate interesting with condescending because they both have the -ing suffix. However, I would probably never use them interchangeably in a sentence. Semantics just wouldn’t allow it.

Thus, tynonyms are important in the fact that the strange associations made as a result of them are having a sociological impact on language. These weird lateral associations are being used by people. Now here’s an area of research that could use some focus over the next few years. As phones get better at implementing predictive text, will tynonyms become less of a factor?

Honestly, what will tie future hole?

As a part of my secondary education, I was forced to read Jane Austen. I know Pride and Prejudice is considered a classic, but argh, it has to be one of the most boring books I’ve ever waded through. I mean, Chaucer, with all the archaic spelling and middle English phonology, is far more entertaining than old Jane. He writes about knights, pilgrims, drinking, trips, and drinking on trips. She writes about prissy girls acting coy and trying to get married. Honestly, which would you prefer?

Anyway, I ashamedly hated Austen in secret. Until I became an undergrad, that is. As a first year, while reading up on Mark Twain, I came upon this excerpt from a letter of his to Joseph Twichell, dated 13th March 1898.

I haven’t any right to criticise books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Word, Mark. Word.